[146626] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Query : seeking a (low cost & secure) turnkey plug-and-play
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Mattinen)
Thu Nov 17 12:35:35 2011
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:34:26 -0800
From: Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <5738C4CB-0114-40B7-9B6D-946F1DFD0104@stumpy.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 11/17/11 4:58 AM, A. Chase Turner wrote:
> I am seeking a $100 turnkey micro hardware appliance to plug into a LAN hub (behind a consumer-level cable modem) whose only purpose in life is to send heartbeat (and simple quality of service metrics) to a pre-configured central aggregation service on the WAN.
>
> Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must be pre-configured and literally plug and play without need for the person installing the appliance to open a web browser to configure. And it must be a secure, good-reputation stand-alone hardware appliance ... because the heartbeat cannot / must not be a service installed on the end-user's computer where it becomes a support burden (e.g., did the end-user turn off their computer? Is their antivirus software blocking the outgoing heartbeat? That the end-user needs to enter a username/password/destination to enable the heartbeat, etc)
>
Mikrotik RouterBoards are low cost and robust. It can be scripted to do
things like call a specific URL every X minutes. Some models have just a
single Ethernet port as well (they're designed to be used as a wireless
AP/CPE with an add-in mini PCI card) for even less confusion about
plugging it in.
~Seth
